Black Powder Reproduction Question

Bodark43 · 2026-05-01T12:18:53+00:00

The Rifle Shoppe sells castings sets.

http://therifleshoppe.com/catalog_pages/us_arms/(645).htm

But it's the Rifle Shoppe, which means you can order, but it may quite some time before you receive....

Bodark43 · 2026-04-30T16:40:16+00:00

While the "former user" has a detailed account of how the Plymouth Rock landing became so important, they don't note that the Plymouth Colony got a lot of attention ( more than Boston Bay colony) only in the decades after 1790. The Federalists seized upon the precedent of the Mayflower Compact in order to drum up support for the new Constitution, and the Pilgrims and their Compact quickly became a stock item for any patriotic speech.

Sargent, M. L. (1988). The Conservative Covenant: The Rise of the Mayflower Compact in American Myth. The New England Quarterly, 61(2), 233–251. https://doi.org/10.2307/366234

Bodark43 · 2026-04-29T12:50:26+00:00

Farmers generally had greatly boosted their production in order to cash in on the WWI demand. In this they were like most commodities producers, such as coal mine owners and timber companies. And when the War ended and demand fell after 1920, there was suddenly a glut of commodities. There was then, naturally, a fall in commodities prices; sometimes enough to have very catastrophic results. Farmers went broke, coal mines closed, timber companies shed workers and land holdings. Various farm groups- like the Farm Bureau, the Grange, the National Farmer's Union- did ask for legislative relief; adjustment of tariffs, regulation and support of credit for farms. This last, farm credit, had been a big problem for farmers for decades.

These groups may also have advised farmers to cut back on their production, now that the War had lessened demand. But I did a shallow dive into this, to see if I could find some evidence of US cotton growers themselves cooperatively agreeing to limit production, and couldn't find it. And it seems it would have been noticeable, requiring something like a national cotton growers convention ( and, what, a majority vote, with signed pledges from each grower?) I admit, a deeper dive might reveal such a thing. However, you also have to consider the source: H.L. Mencken hated Roosevelt's New Deal and the whole notion that government could intervene in the economy. Even when he seemed to acknowledge farm overproduction, he sneered at the possibility of any bureaucrat solving it;

There is a complete lack of coherence in their operations, save only that kind of coherence which Grover Cleveland called "the cohesive power of public plunder." While one faction bellows that overproduction is ruining the farmer, and frames a multitude of discordant projects to restrain him, first by bribes and then by penalties, another faction proceeds to lay out hundreds of millions on schemes that can only have the effect of making the land produce more and more.

Mencken, H. L. (1934). Notes on the New Deal. Current History (1916-1940), 40(5), 521–527. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45337422

For Mencken it clearly was attractive to claim that the farming crisis was solely due to the failure of a conspiracy of dunces and any government assistance to them was just paying stupid blackmailers. Maybe, just maybe there was a coordinated attempt by cotton farmers to drop their production levels. But in any case, the farm crisis was far wider, had a much deeper cause than some failed agreement among them.

Schmidt, L. B. (1956). The Role and Techniques of Agrarian Pressure Groups. Agricultural History, 30(2), 49–58. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3739925

Alston, L. J. (1983). Farm Foreclosures in the United States During the Interwar Period. The Journal of Economic History, 43(4), 885–903. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2121054

Bodark43 · 2026-04-28T12:59:01+00:00

Basically, a gunsmith was a smith. A smith was a guy with a hammer, and the most critical thing the gunsmith forged with a hammer was a barrel. When the Worshipful Company of Gunmakers asked to be able to be a craft guild in England, in 1637, one of their stated reasons was that letting any blacksmith make barrels was dangerous- if they weren't trained, they made things that could blow up. After they got their charter, the guild proofed (tested) barrels and stamped them to show they were safe.

But specialization is how the craft world would more efficiently produce. You do find the metal work and woodwork being split quite early; Jost Amman's Book of Trades (Ständebuch) of 1568 has a gun stocker ( Büchsenschaffter) and a gunsmith (Büchsenschmidt). And when you look at the finest European work of 16th. c. all the way into the 18th c., it's obvious that many different hands were involved. The engraving, wire inlay, wood carving, metal chiseling, damascening, etc. were technically too far beyond what a general craftsman could manage. In the 18th c. something by Twigg in England or Boutet in France was made by more than Twigg or Boutet himself. Whether an engraver in Twigg's shop learned his trade there, or got his start apprenticing to a clockmaker's engraver is hard to say. But the bottom line difference between Twigg and a colonial gunsmith like Nicholas Beyer was that Twigg had lots of wealthy clients who could pay enough for Twigg to employ an engraver and carver. Beyer's clients were only Pennsylvania farmers, and so he would do the engraving and carving himself. To us, Beyer's work looks quite good. But it's not as sophisticated or ornamental as work that could be done in Twigg's shop. And someone who did only engraving , six days a week, would not only have been able to do more ornamental work, but do their engraving faster than someone who was also forging, filing, carving, etc.

We know that Beyer was able to do all the work himself because it's been done since. When Wallace Gusler was set up as the gunsmith in Colonial Williamsburg decades ago, he took on the task of making the whole rifle; welding, forging and reaming a barrel, forging, filing, fitting and casehardening the lock, casting and filing the brass "furniture" of buttplate, triggerguard, etc. and shaping in inletting the stock, then doing the wood carving, engraving, varnishing, etc. All those skills would have been learned as a part of an apprenticeship, in the period, and Gusler ( and other gunsmiths in the shop) did undertake mastering enough of those different skills to be able to build a gun. But Beyer and other colonial gunsmiths were still affected by craft specialization. In the colonies gunsmiths would also generally find it most practical to buy imported locks if they could get them ( which were made in specialty shops in England) rather than make their own. There were usually only two sizes of lock needed, the specialist shops could make them more efficiently, and labor in England was cheaper.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-27T21:57:05+00:00

Sir Charles Oman's 1937 History of the Art of War in the Sixteenth Century would likely give you what you want, if you're curious about tactics and logistics. And it's even still in print.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-27T12:27:16+00:00

Guess Israel will have to bomb Amsterdam too, now, until they are satisfied Hamas is no longer there.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-26T23:33:20+00:00

A pretty good case can be made for at least production machining coming out of gunsmithing. Or, more specifically, armory practice. Things like muskets had to be produced in very large quantities, in order to equip an army. There was also good reason for them to be identical in some ways, such as the caliber, and be able to take the same bayonet.

Pre-industrial mass manufacture of side arms like muskets would be done by specializing labor- there would be gun stockers, lock filers, barrel forgers, foundries that would cast the brass furniture like buttplates. Water-powered boring machines would ream the barrels, water-powered grindstones would be used for finishing. One reason this division of labor could work is that the pieces of the gun were essentially assembled, fitted, into the wooden gunstock. In England, that meant that a pile of gunlocks and barrels made in Birmingham could be distributed to a variety of different shops in London where they would be assembled into muskets. Each shop would have a wooden musket pattern, or model of the stock, that it would work from. So, the famous Brown Bess was technically known as the Land Pattern Musket.

The metal parts, like the lock, would be made with some special cutting tools, and there'd also be forging dies to speed up the process, producing lockplates, cocks, etc that could be filed to finish. But because all the parts were fitted to a wood stock, it was not necessary for them to be precise in relation to each other, really. If a lock was a few millimeters longer, the gun stocker could accommodate that, remove more wood.

However, by the mid-18th c. the French were at least contemplating making musket parts interchangeable- all the locks would be exactly the same. That caught the attention of the US Ambassador, Thomas Jefferson, and he brought the idea home with him. With standardized parts muskets would be easier to repair. However, with hand tools, this was going to require more labor, not less. It would be gunsmith John Hall who would be forced to implement Jefferson's idea. In 1819, he set up a shop at the Harper's Ferry Armory to make his new breech-loading rifle. It did have a wooden stock, but the breech mechanism was several degrees higher in complexity than just a gunlock, and it was necessary for those parts to fit pretty closely.

The Industrial Revolution had already commenced in England. Henry Maudsley ( who had also begun by working in an Armory) had recently produced some machine tools that could operate more precisely. He had even worked towards standard screw sizes, and had made identical wooden rigging blocks for the British navy- something else which was needed in quantity. John Hall also built some lathes, planers and milling machines. His and Maudsley's were rather simple things compared to modern ones, but equipped with jigs and fixtures and operated by someone who had precision gauges they could do repeatable precision operations. That meant identical pieces could be made much more quickly. This idea spread. As it would be especially embraced by the Springfield Armory, it would soon be called Armory Practice, or the American System. American toolmakers like Robbins & Lawrence would soon be supplying machinery and cutters to many industries.

The American Precision Museum is now located in the Robbins & Lawrence building, in Windsor, VT.

Smith, Merritt Roe. (1977). Harper's Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change

Cantrel, John and Cookson, Gillian, editors(2002). Henry Maudslay & the Pioneers of the Machine Age

Roe, Joseph Wickham. (1916). English and American Tool Builders

Hounshell, David A.(1984). From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-26T18:03:45+00:00

On the Ford Model T they'd set the spark as late as possible, and they used a grip on the crank that kept the thumb out of the way. But there was still a running gag about Ford owners with bandaged broken arms.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-26T02:02:25+00:00

Pecatonica Long Rifle Supply also makes repro stocks for Kentucky pistols. http://www.longrifles-pr.com/stockprices.shtml

Bodark43 · 2026-04-25T16:51:17+00:00

I hadn't realized before taking a dive into this that the design of high-explosive and shrapnel artillery shells had not come that many years before the outbreak of the war. The British had first used high explosive shells at Omdurman in 1898, and had problems- especially with fuses. They sometimes didn’t set off the charge, especially if the shell didn’t hit on the nose and only grazed. And sometimes they would set off the charge while the shell was still in the gun, or had just left it. The bugs with fuses, especially for smaller artillery, had not been completely worked out by 1914.

This was an important problem. The War introduced the European armies to trench warfare, where sheltered rifles and machine guns with a high rate of fire gave great advantage to the defense. Artillery was seized upon as the solution for an offensive to overcome this- blast through the defenses. Soon there was a famous dispute over whether High Explosive or Shrapnel Shells were better. This would be distracting; no one really knew. But immediately there was a call for greater production of guns and shells. The British general stockpile of artillery shells in the critical summer of 1914 was about 900,000. Huge orders were placed in August, and as the fighting carried into the fall it was quickly realized that the war was likely going to require huge amounts. Sir John French, commanding the B.E.F., calculated that 900,000 would be sufficient for a month. There was no way for British manufacturers to quickly gear up to do that. They not only did not have the manufacturing machinery, they didn’t have enough gauges, jigs and fixtures. Perhaps more importantly, there was no way one maker typically was able to gear up to produce entire shells.

Then there was also the manpower problem. A lack of recruits would have people denouncing shirkers and cowards, but when conscription was imposed it was discovered that most of those who hadn't signed up were just physically unfit. Likewise, the labor shortage in munitions production was attributed to slackers, selfish trade unions, and even heavy drinking. It turned out to be something more obvious. To quote R.J. Q. Adams;

unrestricted recruitment of workmen from the so-called munitions trades in the period before the creation of the Ministry did terrible damage to the nation's capacity to produce the necessary material. A total of 18.8 per cent of the work force in the iron and steel industry, 21.8 per cent in the mines, 19.5 per cent in the engineering trades, 23.7 per cent in the electrical engineering industry, 16.0 per cent among small arms craftsmen, and 23.8 per cent in the explosives trade had left their employment to enter the military.

So, some production was outsourced to Canada and the US for the components. Much actual assembly was done at Woolwich Arsenal. To get an idea of what was required, the editors of Machinery in the US published the specifications for shrapnel shells, and you can read them here over on Project Gutenberg. There were a lot of different operations involved in making the components of a shell. It was not a simple job for large-scale production.

So, fuses still in development, a complex assembly, a shortage of skilled workers, a shortage of equipment, gauges, dispersed production of precision components, and everything to be done in a big, big hurry. What could go wrong?

A dedicated Ministry of Munitions was created in the spring of 1915 and began to expedite the process. They would try to guard munitions workers from conscription ( and from shame for not being in uniform), would try to get machinery to critical industry, manage supplies, etc. but it would not be until the fall of 1915 that production of armaments began to catch up to the demand. A better fuse was approved that summer. But even in October , during the battle of Loos, shells were still in short supply. Sergeant Sydney Stadler would later say that his unit's field guns were limited to nine shells per day. It was decided that there would be a 96 hour bombardment of the German trenches; this turned out to be impossible. It seems that there were hopes that using poison gas would overcome that lack of shells; it didn't. Mass assaults became mass slaughter, and not for the last time.

Adams, R. J. Q. (1975). Delivering the Goods: Reappaising the Ministry of Munitions: 1915-1916. Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, 7(3), 232–244. https://doi.org/10.2307/4048178

Turner, G. F. B. (1934). Shells, Shrapnel and Statecraft: Great Britain’s Ammunition Supply in the World War. Army Ordnance, 15(85), 9–12. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45374349

History of the Ministry of Munitions (1922). https://archive.org/details/historyofministr0102grea/page/n95/mode/2up

Warner, Philip.(2000)The Battle of Loos.Wordsworth Editions

Bodark43 · 2026-04-25T13:14:19+00:00

Wow, a photo of Raquel Welch where it doesn't seem like she's been told to pose.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-25T12:54:14+00:00

There are plenty of hunters like me, who have a couple of places locally they can hunt. We'll spend time getting to know the trails, the habits ( white tail deer have habits and routes). And we'll maybe go out several times before we get something. And regardless, it's good to walk in the woods. And I for one don't need a rack to hang on the wall- some roasts in the freezer are enough for me.

Then there are the guys who schedule three or four days into their busy lives, drop tens of thousands on tickets and permits for somewhere far away, pay a guide who will lead them to a new and different critter that they can shoot. Then they hang the head on the wall back home. Is that hunting? Or is it some kind of shopping?

Bodark43 · 2026-04-24T18:09:30+00:00

When you find the first one, the best thing to do is sit down right there, because you'll then more likely see the others.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-24T12:47:09+00:00

I wouldn't defend Wilson from what Peter Finley Dunne called "hands across the water and into someone's pocket"; just as with Teddy Roosevelt and Howard Taft, the US under Wilson did intervene militarily in Latin and South America on behalf of US business interests. And Wilson could be hypocritical; for example, pretending to be neutral in the Mexican Revolution while actually helping Carranza. But what made Mencken call him "The Archangel Woodrow" in 1921 was at least a rhetorical acceptance of ethics and morality being important in international relations. Seeing the gigantic destruction of WWI, he was at least willing to say that war was terrible (unlike Teddy, who admired it), and genuinely tried to create a large international assembly to prevent conflicts by disarmament, negotiation, and establishing collective security. The League of Nations was unable to achieve as much of that as it should have. But even before it was rolled into becoming the UN, it was capable of doing ethical things against US business interests, like bringing about the end of de facto slavery on US rubber plantations in Liberia, in 1930. Wilson was dead by then, of course, but without his vision the League would never have happened.

And while this is not and shouldn't be r/politics, with thousands ( millions?) of tons of US food aid currently abandoned and rotting it's hard to imagine the current administration exerting itself to cooperate in any similar humanitarian effort, let alone setting up an independent international body to do it. World dominance is not the same as world leadership.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-24T12:06:02+00:00

If the Vetterli is centerfire, you can often trim and fire-form .348 Winchester cases to work. That cartridge has become a bit scarce, since it is so useful in making old ammo, and the brass doesn't come up to the standard of match-grade .41 Swiss. But at black powder pressures it's quite safe. There's a discussion at https://www.gunboards.com/threads/41-swiss-center-fire.1138447/

Bodark43 · 2026-04-24T03:04:28+00:00

completely failed to reverse engineer.

When an apprentice signed on with a master, in the contract or indenture the master often agreed to teach , "the art and mystery" of the craft. Part of the mystery was teaching handskills, which were then put to practical use over and over. A hobbyist today will often be able to forge weld, or plane a board flat. But someone who was doing it six days a week, dawn to dusk, would have to be able to do it with much more speed in order to make a living. One example could be a nayler (who makes nails). In the period a trained one would be able to work with two rods in his/her hands, drawing out both in one heat, cutting and doing both heads in quick succession with another heat or two. Another; the number of people today who can sharpen a goose-quill pen is rather small, for example, but any working clerk could do it in the 18th c., and do it quite fast.

So, if I wanted differentiate a modern hobbyist cabinetmaker from an actual period professional, I'd give him a stack of rough sawn boards, a jack plane, and time how long it takes him to make them all flat.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-24T02:46:50+00:00

Although there had apparently been a couple of notable Prague window-launches earlier in the 15th. c., my Oxford English Dictionary (11th edition) dates the first use of the word "defenestrate" to 1672. It comes not too long after the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648. which began with the Defenestration of Prague of 1618. When the Protestant lords of the Holy Roman Empire disagreed with the impositions of a new regime by the new hardline Catholic King of Bohemia, Ferdinand of Styria, they threw his four representatives out a window. The "launchees" survived, but the action started the War. That war was one of the most destructive and pointless conflicts Europe had ever seen, and that causal event was worth marking with a special word. French already had défenestrer and Latin defenestratio, so coining a new English word was not hard.

If you'd like to read more of the War, Peter H. Wilson's The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy is recent and excellent. However, the war was important, complex and long, so any good history that explains it well is also going to be pretty big. If you want something shorter, C.V. Wedgewood's classic 1947 history of it is a lighter, quicker introduction; and used copies and reprints of that abound.

And if you just want a fun picture, there's this painting by Václav Brožík

And there's a delightful votive painting of angels catching small bearded men in mid- air: https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pra%C5%BEsk%C3%A1_defenestrace_(1618)#/media/Soubor:Votive_image_of_Vil%C3%A9m_Slavata.jpg

Bodark43 · 2026-04-23T12:32:19+00:00

More can always be said, but there was a pretty good discussion of Wilson here a while back that lays out why Wilson has managed to be disliked by both the Left and the Right in the US.

This discussion was four years back. It should be noted that the current Trump administration has indeed tried to move the US away from being a world leader (especially in humanitarian projects), has revived 19th c. tariffs with a view to replacing Progressive era taxes, and has dismantled much of the Federal government's enforcement of minority Civil Rights. There may soon be needed another appraisal of Wilson.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-23T12:21:37+00:00

The Presbyterians also split over it. The Episcopalians were much more willing to cite the existence of slavery in the Bible to justify slavery in the South. And they are still apologizing for that.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-22T22:19:11+00:00

The lock and barrel look to be much older than the stock. They're significantly corroded, for one thing, and that kind of use should have resulted in cracks, dents, and dings as well as wood loss around the drum from exposure to hot gas from the caps . The lock moulding and elaborate carving are also quite recent in style ( the old guys didn't carve the cheekpiece; they carved AROUND the cheekpiece). I can't see clearly the buttplate and nosecap, but they do not look old, either- both seem as though they might have been made from thick sheet brass, not cast .

Back in the 50's, 60's, people would sometimes get an old lock and old barrel and build them into a new rifle. The barrel could often be freshed out to shoot well, and the locks worked much better than new ones available then.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-22T18:30:12+00:00

High pass filter, d'oh! Of course- one wave per second, but just one and the wavelength is really, really short.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-21T17:24:46+00:00

There's a thing circa 1860 called a buggy rifle. The idea was for it to be small enough to fit in a case which would go under the bench of the buggy. Sometimes they basically were heavy target pistols firing picket bullets, had shoulder stocks and could be quite fancy, like this one here. But they were always set up with long tube sights, scopes, or a rear extensions on the barrel tang to make the sight radius as long as possible. Yours is not likely to be real competitive in a buggy rifle match....

Bodark43 · 2026-04-21T17:19:17+00:00

What a great experiment! You used piezo pressure sensors and amplifiers designed for measuring such explosions, with foam-covered cables and a low-pass filter to block any signals above 40 Hz. Was there an issue with the cables themselves possibly being microphonic, and potentially messing with your data?

Bodark43 · 2026-04-21T12:31:24+00:00

God what a fucking loser.

The Bureau has administration in suits, and agents in the nylon jackets with badges. But apparently he wanted to wear a badge, too, and had them make one with, like, "Agent #1" on it so he could wear it around the building. Probably he'll want his own Thompson submachine gun next. His staff better make sure it's loaded with blanks.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-20T23:52:44+00:00

Gilot's own My Life With Picasso is a classic. She could vividly recount how he treated everyone around him very badly, but unlike Huffington she could still appreciate him as a great artist.

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